The increased sophistication of computing, including mobility, virtualization, dynamic workloads, multi-tenancy, and security needs, require a better paradigm for networking. Virtualization is an important catalyst of the new requirements for networks. With it, multiple VMs can share the same physical server, those VMs can be migrated, and workloads are being built to “scale-out” dynamically as capacity is needed. In order to cope with this new level of dynamics, the concept of a distributed virtual switch has arisen. The idea behind a distributed virtual switch is to provide a logical view of a switch which is decoupled from the underlying hardware and can extend across multiple switches or hypervisors.
One example of a conventional distributed virtual switch is the Nexus 1000V provided by Cisco of San Jose, Calif. Another example is the DVS provided by VMWare of Palo Alto. While both of these are intended for virtual-only environments, there is no architectural reason why the same concepts cannot be extended to physical environments.
Three of the many challenges of large networks (including datacenters and the enterprise) are scalability, mobility, and multi-tenancy and often the approaches taken to address one hamper the other. For instance, one can easily provide network mobility for VMs within an L2 domain, but L2 domains cannot scale to large sizes. And retaining tenant isolation greatly complicates mobility. Conventional distributed virtual switches fall short of addressing these problems in a number of areas. First, they don't provide multi-tenancy, they don't bridge IP subnets, and cannot scale to support tens of thousands of end hosts. Further, the concepts have not effectively moved beyond virtual environments to include physical hosts in a general and flexible manner.
Accordingly, a need remains in the art for a distributed virtual networking platform that addresses these and other issues.